Scarecrow

Twelve names.

That’s what was left on Konrad’s sheet on the eleventh morning. Twelve worlds, out of sixty-four. Twelve that hadn’t come home, or burned, or asked and stayed.

Konrad read them out at the dawn count. All twelve. Standing on his stool on the red glass, because the map room wasn’t big enough for the dawn count any more, not with Hearth and Root and forty-one worlds and every task force coming through every arch to hear.

And when he’d read them, he didn’t sit down.

”These are the hard ones,” he said.

Nobody said anything.

”I put them last,” said Konrad. ”On purpose. On the sheet. Thirty years ago.” He looked at the paper. ”The houses put them last on the tithe, because they were furthest out. I put them last on the sheets because I couldn’t bear to read them first.” He folded it. ”They’re the ones nearest the far yard. Nearest the Hungry. The ones the houses always coded outbound first.” He looked at Okafor. ”They’ll all have the Ashen over them. All twelve. You know they will.”

”Yes,” said Okafor.

”Then we go anyway,” said Konrad.

He said it before Okafor could. I’d never heard him do that.

Aurelius ordered them.

That’s what he does. At the long table in the map room, with Okafor on one side and Aramaeis on the other and Crane across from him with the spanner. He looked at the twelve names for a long time, and at Garnet’s map, and at the three circles on the wall.

Then he moved two of them.

Just two. He took the eleventh name and put it first, and the first name and put it ninth. And said, through Dot, very gently, why.

Okafor looked at him for a long time.

Then she nodded.

”He says,” said Dot, ”the eleventh is the one the Ashen will expect us to leave until last. So they will be there last. So we go there first.”

Arcturus came through the arch with two faces that morning.

I’d never met him. He’s Hearth’s. Tiamat’s people say he’s the one who flies, and the one who knows where every ship is, and that they’re the same thing. He came through in a suit of silver like a flight suit, with a visor pushed up on his forehead and two silver wings folded flat down his back, and went straight to the edge of the interceptor field.

Where Risa was standing. At the arch. With both clouds over her head.

Very big now. Halloway said any day. Risa said Halloway had said any day for a week.

Arcturus looked at her for a long time.

Then he said something, and Dot gave it to her, and Risa laughed for the first time since Vantle.

”He says,” said Dot, ”he’s heard you fly forty ships from the ground with your eyes shut. He says he can see every ship in Hearth’s fleet at once, every engine and every shield, and has never once been able to make two of them do the same thing at the same time without shouting.” A pause. ”He says he’d like to learn.”

The eleventh name went first.

The way Aurelius had said. And when Kyria’s cutters opened the arch onto it at dawn, a long cold world of ice and black water and towns built down into the ice where it was warm, there were no Hands over it. No Ashen. Nothing in the sky but the pale sun.

Three hundred and eighty thousand people. Two towers. Four pieces of queen.

All of them through the arch by noon.

The Hands came over it at dusk. With the Ashen round them. Vessa turned, on the red glass, a long way off, and Andraste said so, and nobody was there for them to find.

Konrad wrote it on the sheet. Home. And beside it, very small: Aurelius.

Aurelius saw it. He didn’t say anything. But Dot says that evening, through the arch with two faces, Rhiannon asked him why he was smiling at his soup.

So they did it together.

That’s how the wing went out, the last twelve days. Risa at the arch, with her clouds, talking to the wing with her eyes shut, the way she has since the wheel. And Arcturus beside her, with his visor down, seeing every one of Hearth’s ships at once, every engine, every shield, every gun.

And between them, they flew everything.

I don’t know how else to say it. Risa’s forty interceptors and Rowan and Callum and Ingrid going first as lightning. And Hearth’s ships, long and narrow and dark, with the shape at the front like a hand closing. All of them. In the sky over every one of the twelve worlds. Moving together. As if one person was flying all of them.

Two people were.

”Left,” Risa would say. With her eyes shut.

And Arcturus would say something in his own language, very quiet, and forty of Hearth’s ships would go left at the same time as forty of ours.

Andraste sat at the arch with Vessa.

She’d said she would. On the roof. After Tarrow’s Reach. After Brannagh. Next time Vessa turns, I’m going to tell someone.

She told Okafor the next morning. Okafor looked at her for a long time.

”She’s a baby,” said Okafor.

”Yes.”

”I wrote not on duty.”

”I know you did,” said Andraste. ”I’m not putting her on duty.” She shifted Vessa on her chest. ”I’m putting me on duty. I’m First Blade. I’ll sit at the arch. Every day. With my daughter. Because that’s where I’d be anyway.” She was very calm. ”And if she turns, I’ll say so. And that’s all.”

Okafor didn’t say anything for a long time.

”And if she doesn’t want to?” she said. ”If one day she just wants to sleep?”

”Then she’ll sleep,” said Andraste. ”And we’ll do it the way we did before her. With ears and smiths and hammers.” She put her scarred hand on Vessa’s back. ”She’s not a weapon, Marshal. She’s a girl who hears things. And her mother is going to sit beside a door.”

Okafor wrote it on the slate. Under the one at the wall. Under not on duty.

Her mother is.

Vessa turned four times in twelve days.

Every time, Andraste said so. Very quietly. To Risa, at the arch. To Arcturus. To the two smiths back to back at every arch on every world, through the silver.

Ashen. That arch. Soon.

And every time, the smiths were ready. And the wing was already turning. And Hearth’s ships were already there, between the Ashen and the door.

Four times.

Nobody else was lost at an arch.

Wren went into labour on the fourth of the twelve days.

On the red glass. At the foot of the arch to Kessra, the fourth world. With her slate. Counting.

She’d been counting every arch since Imber. Every world. Standing at the foot of every arch on the red glass with her slate and her hand on her middle, the ordinary way, counting every person who came through. Not with numbers on the slate. With her silver. The silver the Project put in her and never finished, the silver that lets her hear hearts.

She hears every heart that comes through an arch. And counts it.

Kwame Osei counts too. With his slate. So does Caesar, Dinraal’s Julius, at the far end of every arch, before he’ll let anyone go through. But Wren’s the one who knows. Who stands at the end of the line with her eyes half shut and says that’s everyone or there’s four more, and is never once wrong.

She was counting Kessra.

And she stopped.

”Oh,” said Wren.

Very calmly. At the foot of the arch. With her hand on her middle.

Toby was beside her. He’s always beside her, now. He looked at her face. And then at her hand. And then he went very still, the way he does when he hears a note he’s never heard before.

”Now?” he said.

”Now,” said Wren. And then, without stopping: ”Eleven thousand, four hundred and six. Keep counting, Kwame. There’s a lot more coming.” She handed her slate to Kwame Osei. ”I have to go.”

Halloway was on the long ward.

She’s always on the long ward now. With every one of Sigmund’s held hearts from every world, every one who came through grey from the Ashen wave, every child Rhiannon found in a cellar who hadn’t eaten for a week. Two hundred beds. Then five hundred. Then a second long ward, beside the first, that Kwame Osei dug in a night.

She looked up from the nearest bed when Toby came through the double doors with Wren on his arm.

”Ah,” said Halloway.

”Ah?” said Toby.

”It’s late,” said Halloway. Getting up. Wiping her hands. ”It’s three weeks late. The ordinary way.” She looked at Wren very kindly over her spectacles. ”I was beginning to think it had decided to wait until the war was over.”

”So was I,” said Wren.

”It didn’t.”

”No,” said Wren. And then her face changed. And she held on to Toby’s arm very hard. And didn’t say anything for a while.

When it passed, she said: ”I’d still like to count. If that’s all right.”

Halloway looked at her.

”Count what?”

”Kessra,” said Wren. ”The arch. Kwame’s got the slate, but he can’t hear them.” She swallowed. ”Toby. Bring me the arch.”

So he did.

That’s what Toby does. He carries sound. He can take a note from one place and put it somewhere else, across a canyon or under a ring or into a stone, so that Wren can hear what she needs to hear.

He carried the arch.

Not the stone. The sound of it. Every footstep. Every heartbeat coming through, from Kessra onto the red glass, a mile down the road. He took it, and brought it up the hill into the long ward, and put it in the air round Wren’s bed. Very quietly. The way you’d put music in a room for someone who can’t sleep.

And Wren lay on the bed in the long ward with Toby holding one hand and Halloway at her feet and the whole of Kessra coming through an arch a mile away in the air round her.

And counted.

I came up from the red glass at noon.

I’d heard. Everyone had. Kwame Osei told the General and the General told Konrad and Konrad told Mother and Mother told everyone, very calmly, the way she tells everything, and then went up the hill herself with her tea.

The long ward was very quiet.

All five hundred beds. Every one of the people in them, from every world, who’d been grey or cold or starving or held still by Sigmund, lying very still. Listening.

Because Toby had put the arch in the air.

And under it, threaded through it, Wren. Counting. Out loud. Very quietly. In between.

”Fourteen thousand and ninety. Ninety-one. Ninety-two.”

Then silence. A long one. And Toby’s hand very tight. And Halloway saying something low.

Then: ”Ninety-three. Ninety-four.”

Harriet sang.

She’d come up the hill with Toby’s mother. She sat on the end of her mother’s bed with her legs crossed and sang. Not a song. A note. The one she sings every dawn. The one she sang on the porch the night Wren found out, when something under Wren’s hand hummed back.

And something hummed back.

Louder than it ever had.

It took all day.

The ordinary way. Not ten weeks. Not eleven minutes. Not standing on a ridge laughing at the sky. A woman on a bed on the long ward, the way women had babies on Earth for as long as there were women, with her husband holding her hand and her daughter singing and the old doctor from the Program floors at her feet saying good, good, that’s it every few minutes in a voice I’d never heard her use.

And counting.

All day. Every heart that came through the arch from Kessra. Every one.

Halloway tried once to make her stop.

”Wren,” she said. In the late afternoon. When it was very hard. ”You can stop. Kwame’s got it. Caesar’s got it at the far end.”

”Neither of them can hear,” said Wren. Through her teeth. ”Kwame counts heads. Caesar counts who’s in front of him.” She held on to Toby. ”I count hearts. There’s a woman carrying twins in the next thousand. Kwame’ll count her once.”

Halloway looked at her for a long time.

Then she went back to the foot of the bed.

”Then count,” she said. ”And push.”

Kessra came home at dusk.

All of it. The last of them through the arch onto the red glass in the evening light, with the wing coming down behind them and Hearth’s ships behind the wing and the Ashen, Vessa said, still an hour off. Nobody lost at the arch. The smiths brought it down behind the last Hyrrani with the keystone and the thing from under the mountain and a sound I felt in my teeth.

And in the long ward, in the air round Wren’s bed, Toby let the arch go.

The sound went out of the room.

And Wren said, very quietly, with her eyes shut:

”Two hundred and four thousand, eight hundred and twelve.”

A breath.

”That’s everyone.”

And then she stopped counting.

And the baby came.

A boy.

Small. Red. Furious. The ordinary way. With no silver ring round his eyes and no markings up his arms and nothing at all to show he was anything but a baby born on a bed on the long ward of a world at war, at dusk, to a woman who’d been counting all day.

He opened his mouth and yelled.

And Harriet, on the end of the bed, stopped singing. And looked at her brother.

And laughed.

Toby didn’t say anything.

He couldn’t. He was on his knees beside the bed with Wren’s hand in both of his and his face in the blanket. And the long ward, all five hundred beds of it, the grey ones and the cold ones and the ones Sigmund was still holding, very quietly, from every world, started to clap.

Not loud. Most of them couldn’t. Very softly. All down the long ward. Like rain on a roof.

Halloway put the baby on Wren’s chest.

Wren looked at him for a long time.

She didn’t count him. I watched her not do it. She looked at his small red furious face and her mouth moved, very slightly, the way it does when she’s counting, and then it stopped.

”No,” she said. Very quietly. To herself. ”Not you. You’re not a number.”

She put her hand on his back.

”You’re just here.”

They named him that night.

On the porch. In order. When I said it. Wren at the end of the rail, between Toby and the post, the way she always stands, with the baby against her and Harriet asleep on Toby’s shoulder.

I said it to Wren. And to Harriet. And to Toby.

And then, lower, to the baby. Who’d stopped yelling and was looking at the lamps.

And I didn’t know what to call him.

”Rafe,” said Wren.

Everybody on the porch went very still.

Old Son was on the rail. He usually is, at night, when I say it. He’s old now. Older than any of the kits. His mirror arm doesn’t move as well as it did.

He was there before any of us. Before I came. Before Scarecrow was anything but a base on the canyon rim and the first wave of Earth’s people who’d been sent to Avalon to die on it.

Rafe Dunmore was one of them. The first wave. Thirty-first on the list.

He died around the ninetieth day. Before anyone came. Before the queens, before the hello, before anything. And Old Son, who was a kit with a mirror and nothing else to do, buried him himself. Under a mound of stones at the foot of the base. One stone at a time. With his six thin legs and his one good arm.

And then he climbed to the top of the tower. And flashed Rafe’s number. Thirty-one. Three, a pause, one. Every dawn. Out over the red glass. To nobody.

He was still flashing it when we found them.

Wren saw it first. The first morning. She didn’t need to ask what it meant. She’d come over in the first wave with Rafe. She knew his number. She’d stood beside him on the list. She stood at the foot of the tower and looked at Old Son flashing it, and then at the mound of stones at the base, and she knew.

She asked him not to stop.

He never has.

”Thirty-one,” said Wren. Very quietly. Not to anyone. To Old Son. ”Every dawn. Since before anyone came. You buried him on your own and you never once missed.” She looked down at the baby. ”Somebody should say it out loud, too. Not just with a mirror.” She put her hand on his head. ”Every day. Every time they call him in for supper.”

Old Son didn’t say anything. Old Son doesn’t, mostly.

He lifted his mirror arm. Slowly. Because it’s stiff now.

And in the lamplight on the porch, he flashed it.

Three. A pause. One.

Voss came up the hill at midnight.

From TEODOR’S. From the shed by the river in Thera with the bicycles. In her plain coat with oil on the cuffs. She’d heard from the bakery, and the bakery had heard from Maura.

She stood at the bottom of the porch steps and looked up at her niece.

She didn’t say anything for a long time.

Then she came up the steps. One at a time. And knelt down beside the chair where Wren was sitting with the baby. And looked at him.

”Rafe,” said Voss. And then, very quietly, the name only she uses: ”Mara.”

”Rafe,” said Wren.

Voss looked at the baby for a long time.

”I signed your transfer,” she said. Very quietly. ”With my own name. Nobody made me. I told myself it was the right thing.” She swallowed. ”I cut your hair with the post scissors every month till you were twelve. I only ever sang then. I never once sang to you.”

”You sang while you cut it,” said Wren. ”Every month. When you thought I wasn’t listening.”

Voss looked at her.

”I was always listening,” said Wren. ”I hear hearts, Aunt.” She held the baby out. ”Yours always went faster when you sang.”

Voss took him.

Very carefully. The way you’d hold something you were afraid you’d break. The way she holds the bicycles when she’s mending them.

And sang.

Very badly. Very quietly. A song from Earth, from before the domes, that nobody on the porch knew. And the baby stopped looking at the lamps and looked at her instead.

And Harriet, asleep on Toby’s shoulder, woke up. And sang it with her. Without knowing the words.

Anja’s came three days later.

In the Calders’ kitchen. Not the long ward. Anja said she wasn’t having a baby in a hospital when she had a perfectly good kitchen and a mother-in-law who’d delivered half the lower levels of the dome with a pot of hot water and her bare hands.

Maura delivered him.

With Halloway standing in the doorway with her arms folded, not allowed in. And Liam on the floor by the stove with his hands on fire, not on purpose, and Rory putting it out with a damp cloth every few minutes without being asked. And Rory the second on the stairs, very hot, leaving scorch marks on every step, waiting.

It was fast. Not as fast as mine. Faster than Wren’s. Anja is finished; her silver made her stronger than anything anyone can measure. She sat up on the kitchen table in the middle of it and picked up the old oven again with one hand, without meaning to, and put it down on Rory’s foot, again. Rory sat on the floor and laughed until he cried, again.

And then a boy.

Loud. Hot. Very hot. Maura took him in a towel that started smoking at the edges, and wrapped him tighter, and the smoke stopped, because she told the warm where to go.

Liam held him on the floor by the stove.

He didn’t say anything for a long time. Liam doesn’t, when it matters. He sat with his back against the oven with his son in his arms and his own hands very carefully not on fire, and looked at him.

Sera was in the doorway. Beside Halloway. She’d come running from the forge with her hands still glowing.

”What’s his name?” she said. Very quietly.

Liam looked up at his sister.

Then at Anja, on the kitchen table. Who nodded.

”Cormac,” said Liam.

Sera put her hand over her mouth.

Maura sat down on the kitchen bench. Very suddenly. Rory, on the floor with his foot under the oven, stopped laughing.

Cormac was their cousin. Liam’s and Sera’s. On Earth. Under the dome. A boy two years older than Sera, Maura’s sister Nessa’s eldest, older than Bree and Roan, who lived two doors down on the same level and taught Liam to light a match before the Program came to the gate for Rory’s fire. Who got the fire fever the winter Sera was nine. The one that went through the lower levels every few years, that the medics never came down that far for.

He was eleven.

Sera told me about him once. On the roof, the first year. She said he was the first person she ever saw burn up from the inside, and that she’d been frightened of fire ever since, even her own. Especially her own.

”You never said,” she said now. To Liam. From the doorway. Her voice was shaking. ”You never once said his name. Not since.”

”No,” said Liam.

”Why now?”

Liam looked down at his son. Hot. Loud. Burning very slightly at the edges of the towel, the way Calder babies do.

”Because this one won’t,” he said. ”Burn up. Not ever.” He put his hand on the baby’s chest, and the heat went into him, harmless, the way it goes into Liam. ”His fire’s his. Not a fever. It’ll never take him.” He looked up at his sister. ”I wanted Cormac’s name on someone it couldn’t take.”

Sera came across the kitchen.

She knelt down on the floor by the stove beside her brother. With her glowing hands. And put one on the baby’s head.

He didn’t burn her. She didn’t burn him.

”Hello, Cormac,” she said.

Maura, on the bench, put her face in her hands.

Rory got his foot out from under the oven. Slowly. And went and sat beside his wife. And put his arm round her. And didn’t say anything at all.

Maura sent for her sister that evening.

Nessa lives in the town under the garden wall. In a crooked house at the end of a street near the bakery, with her two who are left: Bree and Roan. Cormac’s younger sister and brother. He was the eldest. Liam’s and Sera’s cousins. They came over on one of the big crossings from Earth, Maura says, with almost nothing. Roan fixes roofs now. Bree works the ovens at Meg’s. And Nessa sits on the step with the other grandmothers and says very little. I’d met them at the long table on Sundays. I’d never heard any of them say Cormac’s name.

They came up the hill at dusk. The three of them. Slowly. Roan with his cap in his hands. Bree with her arm through her mother’s.

They stopped in the Calders’ kitchen doorway.

Liam stood up off the floor by the stove. With the baby. And didn’t say anything. He just held him out.

To his aunt.

Nessa took him.

She looked at him for a long time.

The kitchen was very quiet. Maura on the bench with Rory’s arm round her. Sera by the stove. Anja on the table. Rory the second on the stairs, not leaving scorch marks, for once.

Nessa didn’t cry. Not then. She looked at the baby’s face. At the red hair that was already there, a little, the Calder red. At his mouth. At the way he was frowning at the lamp, very hot, very cross, as if it had done something to him.

”Roan,” she said. ”Bree.”

Her children came and stood either side of her. And looked.

Nobody said anything for a long time.

Then Roan put one finger out. Very slowly. A roofer’s finger, rough and scarred. And the baby took hold of it. And held on. And didn’t burn him.

”He does,” said Roan. Very quietly. ”Mam. He does.”

”He does,” said Bree. She had her hand over her mouth. ”The frown. Look at the frown.” Her voice went. ”Cormac frowned at lamps. When he was this small. You used to say they’d done something to him.”

”I know,” said Nessa.

She looked up at Liam. Then at Maura. Then back at the baby.

”He looks like Cormac,” she said. ”He looks just like him.”

And then she cried.

Maura got up off the bench.

She came across the kitchen to her sister and put her arms round her. Round her and the baby both. And Bree put hers round the two of them, and Roan round all three. And they stood in the middle of the Calders’ kitchen, the four of them, with Cormac in the middle, frowning at the lamp, holding on to Roan’s finger, very hot.

Nobody said anything.

Then Sera, by the stove, very quietly, said: ”Hello, Auntie. Hello, Bree. Hello, Roan.”

The way she used to, Maura told me afterward. When she was nine. On the lower levels. Two doors down. Every morning, on the way past.

Bree laughed. Through it. And held out her free hand.

And Sera came and took it.

Wren asked me the morning after Cormac came.

On the long ward. In the bed by the window, with Rafe asleep on her chest and Toby asleep in the chair beside her with his head on the blanket.

”After,” she said. ”You said after.”

I knew what she meant.

She’d asked me on the porch, the night she found out. Whether her unfinished silver was safe for the baby. It was. It’s a door nobody hung, I said. And she asked me to finish it. And I said: after.

”It’s after,” said Wren.

”Are you sure?” I said. ”You told me once you didn’t want to be someone else. Hana’s water became air. Anja’s strength became something nobody can measure.” I sat down on the edge of the bed. ”You said you didn’t know what you’d become.”

”I still don’t,” said Wren. ”Nobody does. Nobody ever does.” She put her hand on Rafe’s back. ”But I counted all day yesterday. With my eyes shut. Two hundred and four thousand hearts through an arch a mile away, with Toby carrying them up the hill.” She looked at me. ”And I couldn’t hear the ones on the other side.”

”What other side?”

”Kessra,” said Wren. ”Before the arch. The ones still coming. The ones in the far towns, walking. I could only hear them once they were through.” She was very quiet. ”If I could hear them before. On the other side. I’d know who wasn’t going to make it to the arch in time. And I could tell someone. And they could go and get them.”

She looked at me for a long time.

”Finish it,” she said. ”Please. I don’t want to be someone else. I want to be the one who knows who’s missing before they’re missing.”

I did it that morning.

On the edge of her bed on the long ward, with my hand very lightly on her wrist. Out from the heart. One path at a time. I found each one that should have joined and didn’t, the Project’s, laid down a long time ago and stopped, and asked it, very gently, to finish.

And Wren counted them. The way she’d want to. One at a time.

”One,” she said. With her eyes shut.

”Two.”

”Three.”

Rafe slept through all of it.

At nine, the last path joined.

I felt it go. Every atom. The whole of her silver, which had been a door nobody hung for thirty years, swinging all the way open.

And Wren went very still.

She didn’t say anything for a long time. Rafe was asleep on her chest. Toby had woken up and was watching her face.

Then she said: ”Oh.”

Very quietly.

”Oh, Lucas.”

”What?”

”I can hear them,” said Wren.

She opened her eyes.

”All of them. Not just here. Not just the long ward.” She turned her head toward the window. Toward the red glass, and the arches, and the plain going away toward Thera. ”Through the arches. All of them. Every one that’s open.” Her voice was shaking. ”The Wall. Root. Hearth. Every world on the long table.” She swallowed. ”The two worlds we’re going to today. Both of them. Every heart on both of them. Before anyone’s gone through.”

She put her hand over her mouth.

”There’s a girl on the second one,” she said. Through her fingers. ”In a cellar. Under a mill. On her own. Nobody knows she’s there.”

I didn’t say anything.

I went to find Rhiannon.

Rhiannon was in the kitchen.

Of course she was. With her basket. She looked up when I came in, and saw my face, and put the basket down before I’d said anything.

”Where?” she said. Through Dot. She doesn’t wait.

”Wren hears her,” I said. ”A girl. Under a mill. On the second world today. On her own.”

Rhiannon was already standing.

”How long since she ate?”

I didn’t know. I didn’t have to. Rhiannon shut her eyes.

The way she did at the foot of the arch on Corran. Very still. With her hand flat on the kitchen table among the bread.

”She can’t,” said Rhiannon. ”I can’t reach that far. Not to a world we haven’t opened.” She opened her eyes. Very sharp. ”But Wren can.”

We went to the long ward.

Rhiannon sat down on the edge of Wren’s bed. On the other side from me. With Rafe asleep between them on Wren’s chest, and Toby in the chair.

And put her hand on Wren’s arm.

I’d seen it in Asha’s notes. Dinraal had told me, once. That Rhiannon’s silver doesn’t make armour, or weapons, or wings, or not first. That it makes everyone else’s more. She stands in a room and every suit of silver in it gets brighter. Stronger. Further.

She put her hand on Wren’s arm. On silver that had been finished that morning.

And Wren gasped.

”Oh,” she said. ”Oh. She’s—”

She shut her eyes.

”The mill,” said Wren. ”By the river. The east side of the town. There’s a trapdoor under the millstone. She’s under it.” Her voice was very fast. ”Nine. Maybe ten. She’s been there since the pods came. Four days. Her mother put her there and told her to stay quiet.” She swallowed. ”Her mother isn’t coming back.”

Rhiannon’s face didn’t change.

”Four days,” she said. Very quietly. ”Without bread.”

”There’s water,” said Wren. ”A pipe. She’s been drinking from the pipe.” She opened her eyes. ”Her heart’s very slow. But it’s there.”

Teshka went.

With Kyria. Back to back. Through the arch onto the second world at noon, while the rest of the town came through the other way. Down to the river. To the mill on the east side. To the millstone.

Teshka lifted it. On her own. Kyria said afterward she’d never seen Teshka lift anything, and that she’d been a First Blade for thirty years and she wasn’t sure she could have lifted it herself.

There was a trapdoor under it. And under the trapdoor, in the dark, by a dripping pipe, a girl. Nine, maybe ten. Very still. Very thin. Who looked up at the light and the two tall women in it with their blades and didn’t make a sound, because she’d been told to stay quiet.

Teshka knelt down at the edge of the trapdoor.

And held out her hand.

And said, in Vaeli, which the girl didn’t speak, the thing she says to Saska when Saska’s done something brave.

The girl took it.

Rhiannon was at the foot of the arch on the red glass when they came through.

With bread.

She didn’t give it to her straight away. She knelt down in front of the girl. Very slowly. And looked at her for a long time. At her face. At her hands.

Then she broke off a very small piece. The size of a coin. And put it in the girl’s palm.

”Slowly,” said Rhiannon. Through Dot. ”A little at a time. Your stomach has forgotten.”

The girl ate it.

Then Rhiannon gave her another.

And Wren, on the long ward, a mile away, with Rafe on her chest and Rhiannon’s silver still bright in her arm, said very quietly to nobody:

”There. Her heart’s going faster.”

Risa came to see Rafe on the twelfth evening.

Slowly. Very slowly. Up the hill from the interceptor field, where she’d stood at the arch all day with her eyes shut and Arcturus beside her, flying everything. With both clouds over her head. The big one grey. The little one, Wheel, white and flickering and much bigger than it had been. The size of a plate itself, now. Nearly as big as her mother’s.

She sat down on the end of Wren’s bed with a sound like a sack of flour going down.

”Halloway says any day,” she said.

”Halloway’s said any day for two weeks,” said Wren.

”I know.” Risa put her hand on her middle. ”She’s waiting. Like Vessa. Only not for quiet.” She looked at Wheel, over her head. ”For the wing to come home. Every evening. She won’t settle until she’s counted them all through the arch.”

Wren looked at her for a long time.

”I know who she gets that from,” she said.

Risa almost smiled.

She looked at Rafe. Asleep on Wren’s chest. Small and red and ordinary.

Wheel drifted.

Off Risa’s head. Across the end of the bed. The way it drifted over Jessa on the porch, months ago, before anyone knew. And stopped over Rafe.

And glowed. Very faintly. Silver.

And then, very gently, the first time Wheel had ever done it to anyone but family, it rained on him. Three drops. Warm.

Rafe woke up. And looked at the cloud. And didn’t yell.

”She likes him,” said Wren.

”She likes everyone,” said Risa. ”That’s the trouble.” She called Wheel back. It came, slowly. ”She’s going to be impossible.”

”So’s Rafe,” said Wren. ”He yelled for an hour when he was born. Toby says it was the loudest thing he’s ever carried.”

Risa looked at Rafe for a long time.

”Good,” she said. ”They can be impossible together.”

Toby’s mother sat with Mother on the porch that night.

The two of them. In the two chairs at the end. Father’s, and the one beside it. With tea.

I don’t know Toby’s mother well. Nobody does. Toby’s family doesn’t do much of anything loudly. She came up the hill every day after Harriet was born and sat in the kitchen and held her, and went home at dusk, and said almost nothing.

She said something now.

”He counted it,” she said. Very quietly. To Mother. ”Toby. When she was born. Harriet. He carried every note in the room for an hour and didn’t drop one.” She held her cup in both hands. ”His father couldn’t hold a tune in a bucket.”

Mother didn’t say anything.

”And now there’s two,” said Toby’s mother. ”And she counted all day. Two hundred thousand. With the baby coming.” She shook her head. ”I don’t know where they get it from.”

Mother looked at her for a long time.

”From you,” she said. ”You came up the hill every day and held her and didn’t say anything. That’s where you learn to listen.”

Toby’s mother looked at her cup.

She didn’t say anything else. But she stayed on the porch until the lamps went out.

By the eighteenth day, there were five names left on Konrad’s sheet.

Seven of the twelve had come home. Nearly all, every one. Because Aurelius moved them, and Risa and Arcturus flew them, and Vessa turned when it mattered and her mother said so. And because from that morning on, every arch that opened, Wren had already counted the far side.

She said who was missing before they were missing.

And someone went and got them.

Konrad looked at the five names for a long time, at the dawn count on the eighteenth day.

Then he said: ”These are the last.”

”Yes,” said Okafor.

”After these, the sheet’s done.” He turned it over in his hands. ”Thirty years. Sixty-four worlds. I signed for every one.” He looked up. ”After these, there won’t be anything left on it.”

”No,” said Okafor.

Konrad didn’t say anything for a long time.

”I don’t know what I’ll carry,” he said. ”In my coat. Over my heart. When it’s done.”

Mother, beside him on the red glass, put her hand on his arm.

”The names,” she said. ”The ones who came home.” She looked at the sheet. ”Write them on the back.”

Konrad turned it over.

The back of the sheet was blank. It always had been. Thirty years.

He looked at it for a long time.

Then he took his pen out.

He didn’t write a number.

He wrote a name. Very small. In the neat hand he signed with for thirty years. At the very top of the blank side.

Rafe.

Then, under it, the girl from the cellar under the mill, who’d told Rhiannon her name on the red glass between two pieces of bread the size of coins.

Then Brannagh.

Then the forty from the cellar on Corran, one at a time, that Rhiannon had written down for him.

He was still writing when the arches opened for the day. He wrote all the way through the dawn count, on his stool, with the General standing beside him. He didn’t look up once.

He was looking up now. Every day. He’d said so.

Just not at the sheet.

At the end of the dawn count, Ingrid came and stood behind his stool and read the names over his shoulder, one at a time, under her breath. Konrad didn’t stop writing. But he moved the sheet, very slightly, so she could see.

Days 4532–4549. Thirty-One.

Twelve names left; Konrad: the hard ones, we go anyway. Aurelius moved two; the Ashen expect the eleventh last. Arcturus learned from Risa: between them they flew everything. Andraste sat at the arch with Vessa: she’s not a weapon; her mother is on duty. Vessa turned four times; nobody else lost at an arch. Wren went into labour counting Kessra; Toby carried the arch up the hill into the long ward; she counted all day; two hundred and four thousand, eight hundred and twelve; that’s everyone. Then a boy, the ordinary way. Not you; you’re not a number; you’re just here. Rafe, for Rafe Dunmore of the first wave, thirty-first, dead around the ninetieth day, whom Old Son buried under stones at the base and flashed for every dawn until we came. Old Son flashed thirty-one. Anja’s came three days later in the Calders’ kitchen: Cormac, for the cousin the fire fever took at eleven; his fire’s his, and it’ll never take him. Nessa came at dusk with Bree and Roan, Cormac’s younger sister and brother; he frowns at lamps; he looks just like him. Voss sang, badly; Harriet sang with her. After: I finished Wren’s silver in one morning, and she counted each path. At the ninth, she could hear every heart through every open arch, before anyone went through. A girl in a cellar under a mill; Rhiannon’s silver made Wren’s further; Teshka lifted the millstone; bread the size of a coin. The eleventh name first: Aurelius. By the eighteenth day, five left. Wheel rained three drops on Rafe. Mother to Konrad: write the names on the back.